NOTE! This project has been permanently archived and will not be maintained. Any scraping/twitter APIs have been severly. Also, it's a shit platform spewing hate speech and misinformation. Come join the federated ActivityPub folks! There will likely be a federated version of this project.

A Lame Twitter Printer

The lame twitter printer is a Raspberry Pi Zero W hacked onto a USB receipt printer, combined with twitter will print all tweets (and included static media) that are tweeted at it!

This project utilizes the twint Python library, allowing for seemingly unlimited, quick Twitter requests & queries, along with not requiring a login or authenicated API. Thanks, twint!

A fun program that I (lamemakes) will use at the Rochester Maker Faire 2022. Use the code for whatever you like!

Hardware

What I used:

• Raspberry Pi Zero W
• Bixolon SRP-350PLUSIII receipt printer
• An I2C 128x64 OLED display
• A stripped down 12v-to-5v USB buck converter (to power the RPi)
• Custom 3D printed bracket to mount the hardware in the printer

Installation

1. Connect the Raspberry Pi Zero W to the internet & enabled SSH. This can now be done headlessly via the RPi Imager (CTRL + Shift + X - thank me later).

2. Connect the Receipt Printer to the Pi via USB. In my development & testing, I used a Bixolon SRP-350PLUSIII.

3. SSH to the Pi & install the code:

   1. (Optional) Install the Adafruit OLED library sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Python_SSD1306.git#egg=Adafruit_SSD1306

   2. Install twitter-printer sudo pip3 install git+https://github.com/lamemakes/twitter-printer.git#egg=twitter-printer

Configuration

Upon initial installation, run the package using: sudo python3 -m twitter-printer.main

Obtain the vendor & product ID's of the USB printer via: lsusb The output should look something like the following: Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1504:003d Bixolon CO LTD SRP-350plusIII Where 1504is the Vendor ID, and 003dis the Product ID.

This will generate the configuration at /etc/twitter_printer/config/config.json , populate the needed fields accordingly:

• watchUser: Username to monitor on twitter for new tweets. i.e., @lame_printerwould be used to watch for tweets containing such.
• nastyWords: A list of terms that will filter out tweets if the tweet contains that word. Filter nasty words.
• footerMessage: A message to be printed at the bottom of every tweet print, can be anything.
• oledDisplay: A boolean value to enable/disable an OLED display output. False by default.
• idVendor: The previously noted vendor ID.
• idProduct: The previously noted product ID.

Usage

The Twitter printer can be run using the command: sudo python3 -m twitter-printer.main

Then, just tweet at your specified watchUser! It can print images that are attached to tweets, and QR codes by encapsulating the desired QR link in parenthesis. Example: qr(www.lamemakes.com)

NOTES:

• To run the printer on every boot & using debian, add the startup command to /etc/rc.local
• The twitter-printer MUST be run as sudo/root. It won't (in my experience) have proper permissions to access the USB printer otherwise.
• This is a WIP, and although mostly done some spitshine will come in the following weeks ;)
• All logging output goes to /etc/twitter_printer/logging/twitter_printer.log
• Package may/may not be uploaded to PyPi. Will be demand based